Aaron Swartz, the 26-year-old programmer, internet activist, and co-founder of Reddit, killed himself on Friday in New York. The news, first reported by MIT's The Tech, was confirmed in a statement from Swartz's lawyer and later by his mother, who wrote, "Thank you all for your kind words and thoughts. Aaron has been depressed about his case/upcoming trial, but we had no idea what he was going through was this painful."

In July 2011, Swartz was indicted for downloading 4.8 million documents from online academic journal library JSTOR, which he apparently intended to distribute for free via peer-to-peer file-sharing sites. As a Harvard researcher at the time, Swartz had legal access to JSTOR's files, but it was his plan to give them away — and the fact that he broke into the networks of nearby MIT to pull the materials — that got him into trouble. In September 2012, he returned to court to plead not guilty to charges of wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer. (He was facing 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine.) Just this week, JSTOR (which never pursued charges against Swartz) began offering limited free access to its materials....

Mefree -thanks for collecting this material. I watched Aaron's Keynote above. This might sound radical, but it struck me that the senator's "rabid" reaction to not having control over the internet and the over-the-top treatment/intimidation of Aaron by the authorities, almost out of fear and ignorance, was akin to a facist mindset. In the extreme, facists and dictators tend to round up all the intellectuals (or basically anyone smarter than they are), and they make them disappear. I hope people do not quietly accept the authorities' attitudes in these cases, because something is wrong here. Aaron's death is a terrible loss to us all.

The punishment needs to fit the crime. They were trying to make an example out of him, or had other motivations. Some have speculated the prosecution was out for retribution for his activism. I don't know.

A bright and creative man is lost to the world. Who knows what he might have accomplished? He did quite a lot in his short life.

The directive is seen as a watershed moment after a ten-year-long campaign that has involved a considerable amount of associations and activists, including Aaron Swartz, who was accused of downloading JSTOR articles, an action that was directly influenced by the open access ethos. The supporters of the movement argue that articles and data that are the result of public money should not be behind a paywall — it's essentially, for them, akin to the public paying twice. This directive might change that.

"The logic behind enhanced public access is plain. We know that scientific research supported by the Federal Government spurs scientific breakthroughs and economic advances when research results are made available to innovators," wrote Holdren in the response to the online petition. "Policies that mobilize these intellectual assets for re-use through broader access can accelerate scientific breakthroughs, increase innovation, and promote economic growth."

According to Nature, the directive might increase the number of freely available article twofold. The memo comes almost a year after the online petition reached the threshold requiring the White House to respond and just a week after a bill, the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR) that proposes similar policies, was introduced in Congress.

Very nice! Thanks snippy!

Logged

The ultimate authority must always rest with the individual's own reason and critical analysis.-Dalai Lama

The nation's top law enforcement officer finds nothing to criticize in the controversial prosecution of Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide months before his criminal trial was scheduled to begin.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder defended the criminal case against the late activist Aaron Swartz today, saying the penalties sought represented a "good use of prosecutorial discretion."

In an appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Holder denied that Justice Department prosecutors engaged in any wrongdoing, arguing that Swartz could have avoided a lengthy prison sentence if he had simply accepted a guilty plea of up to six months.

Swartz committed suicide on January 11 in New York. His family and friends have blamed prosecutors for filing 13 felony charges -- meaning years or decades in prison if convicted -- against the late activist for allegedly downloading academic journals he was authorized to access, but not access in such large quantities. "He was killed by the government," Swartz's father, Robert, said at his son's funeral.

Holder's remarks came in response to questions from Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, who accused the department of "prosecutorial zeal and, I would say, even misconduct."

US law requires that the government provide easy access to public records to the general public. The term "public record" can be confusing to many people because even though a record is "public" and available for public examination, it may not be readily accessible for many reasons. States and federal law definitions of what records are public vary, but generally they may include birth, marriage, and death records, court filings, arrest records, government contracts holders, property ownership and tax information, minutes of government meetings, SEC filings, driver's license information, occupational licenses and medical licenses. All of these may be public records, but a person might not be able to access them freely. This raises the question: what good are public records that no one sees? The answer is no good at all. As Professor Fred Cate states:

"Open access to public records is a cornerstone of American democracy. Such access is central to electing and monitoring public officials, evaluating government operations, and protecting against secret government activities. Open access recognizes that citizens have a right to obtain data that their tax dollars have been spent to create or collect. The value of this essential infrastructure, however, extends far beyond government. Its benefits are so numerous and diverse that they impact virtually every facet of American life, to the extent that we frequently take the benefits for granted."

Aaron Swartz would have agreed with Cate. Swartz was one of this generation’s greatest advocates for Open Access and the free Internet movement. He championed ideas and technologies that put public records within the reach of ordinary citizens for free. Reddit, RSS and Creative Commons licenses are all part of the legacy he left behind. Swartz, as founder of the organization Demand Progress, helped to organize the grassroots opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) legislation being championed in Congress. Although current laws do not recognize any distinction between computer crimes committed for profit and those of Swartz which were committed to spread information that he thought should be available to the public, there should a difference. He was in the midst of preparing for a crucial hearing in his federal criminal case when he committed suicide. Swartz’s suicide which is linked to being prosecuted by the government for releasing JSTOR records without permission only highlights why public records should be free.

Swartz had a long history of working to improve access to public records. In 2006, he acquired the Library of Congress’s complete bibliographic dataset and posted the data in the Open Library because government documents are not copyright-protected within the USA. The library charged fees to access this and Schwartz believed such information should be made freely available. Then in 2008, he answered the appeal of fellow activist Carl Malamud to visit one of 17 libraries conducting a free trial of the antiquated Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system and download court documents to send to him for free public distribution. Swartz downloaded almost 20% of the entire database using a Perl computer script and donated the documents to Malamud’s non-profit Public.Resource.org. Malamud argued that the government produced documents should be free and PACER was charging 8 cents a page for the information.

The PACER free trial was shut down after the court system’s IT department realized someone was downloading everything for free, even though none of the records were private or sealed. The U.S. court system told the FBI that Swartz comprised the system and pilfered approximately 18 million pages of documents worth $1.5 million dollars because that is how much the public records would have cost if he had paid PACER’s fee of eight cents a page. Federal agents also checked Swartz’s Facebook page, researched his work history, looked for outstanding warrants and prior convictions, looked to see if his cell phone number had ever come up in a federal wiretap or pen register, and checked him against the records in a private data broker’s database. The FBI investigated Swartz for helping to put public documents in the public domain online and closed the case without any charges being filed. Swartz learned about their investigation by filing a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI.

Sometimes people do not recognize censorship in its many forms and guises. One of the most effective ways to censor information is to put up a fee barrier. This is what was happening with the databases Swartz was accessing for public records. Clemson University professor Kelly Caine believes that Swartz "was doing this not to hurt anybody, not for personal gain, but because he believed that information should be free and open, and he felt it would help a lot of people." The fees may not have appeared to be exorbitant but they added up for the average person. The court would have charged Swartz a total of $1.5 million for the free documents he downloaded from PACER. Imagine if you had to pay $1 for every internet page you accessed including your email account. That $1 fee per page would change the way you surfed, checked accounts, entertained, educated and informed yourself online. More importantly, it would likely keep you from accessing public records released for your health and safety.

Law enforcement eventually did catch up with Swartz. As the New York Times reported in 2011: "A respected Harvard researcher who also is an Internet folk hero has been arrested in Boston on charges related to computer hacking, which are based on allegations that he downloaded articles that he was entitled to get free." Swartz reportedly downloaded about 4 million articles from academic journals stored in JSTOR, a fee-based repository which provides a limited number of articles to students and researchers free of charge. The massive download requests caused some of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s servers to crash. At the time, Swartz was a fellow at Harvard University and was provided with a free JSTOR account. However, he took measures to hide his own identity as the computer’s owner and user on the JSTOR network. Prosecutors alleged that he downloaded an extraordinary number of articles from JSTOR using a laptop attached to MIT's computer network, which ran a script named "keepgrabbing.py". They said that Swartz acted with the intention of making the papers available for free on peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing sites. Swartz was charged with computer fraud, wire fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer and recklessly damaging a protected computer. He faced up to 35 years in prison and a fine of $1M if convicted. Swartz pled not guilty.

Prosecutors expected the Swartz case to test how far the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) of 1986 could be applied in a situation like Swartz’s unauthorized accessing of free information he was entitled to get. The CFAA was enacted to enhance the government’s ability to prosecute hackers who accessed computers to steal information or to disrupt or destroy computer functionality. JSTOR, the victim, made a public statement after Swartz’s arrest that it would not pursue civil litigation against him. Moreover, shortly before his death, JSTOR decided to make “more than 4.5 million articles" available free to the public. Thus, it is apparent no real harm was done by Swartz. Prosecutors routinely decline to prosecute cases where the black letter law may have been violated but the victim is not aggrieved; yet, in this case, the prosecutors relentlessly went after Swartz because they wanted to make an example of him. In the eyes of the law, Swartz was a criminal. He broke the law when he violated a “terms of service” agreement and accessed so many free public documents. MIT had no problem with supporting the prosecution in their case against him.

MSNBC contributor Chris Hayes summed the situation up when he said, "at the time of his death Aaron was being prosecuted by the federal government and threatened with up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines for the crime of—and I’m not exaggerating here—downloading too many free articles from the online database of scholarly work JSTOR." The federal government is unlikely to prosecute typical internet users for violating terms of service agreements but Swartz was unfairly singled out because he had been so vocal about open access. Just the thought of being convicted on felony charges like the ones Swartz was facing is a very big deal with lifelong implications and his initial attorney notified prosecutors that he was at risk for suicide. Whether it was 35 years or six months in jail, the depressed young man would have been forever scarred by the overzealous and overly aggressive prosecution lead by U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz for violating a “terms of service” agreement for documents in the public domain.

In the wake of Swartz’s suicide, Congressional Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) introduced legislation she dubbed "Aaron's Law," which would modify the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the basis for Swartz's prosecution, to clarify that its definition of unauthorized access "does not include access in violation of an agreement or contractual obligation, such as an acceptable use policy or terms of service agreement, with an Internet service provider, Internet website, or employer." It would make a similar change to the wire fraud statute.

Amending a hacking law like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 to exclude end-user license agreement (EULA) violations is not enough to address the issue of free access to public records. Swartz wanted information everyone has the right to know to be made public for free. JSTOR seems to be getting that point, even though the organization has not ceased to charge access fees for one of the world’s largest archives of scholarly literature that is mostly in the public domain. In an undated, unsigned statement, it admits that the Swartz “case is one that we ourselves had regretted being drawn into from the outset, since JSTOR’s mission is to foster widespread access to the world’s body of scholarly knowledge." This mission was not actually harmed by Swartz’s actions in the case.

JSTOR has received some unauthorized help in spreading this access to their archive of scholarly knowledge. A couple of days ago, a group of online archivists released the "Aaron Swartz Memorial JSTOR Liberator,” a JavaScript-based bookmarklet that lets Internet users "liberate" an article, already in the public domain, from the online academic archive JSTOR. By running the script—which can only be used once per browser—a public domain academic article is downloaded from JSTOR to the user’s computer, then uploaded back to ArchiveTeam in a small act of protest against the organization’s restrictive policies.

Though there is a plethora of free public record information on the web, the type and quality of the information varies from state to state. Most government agencies and court systems at all levels of government - local, state, and federal - are making public records available on websites to different degrees. However, all of this public information is not necessarily available to access for free online. Sometimes the information is accessible electronically from government sites for free or a low-cost. Other times, the agency or court sells the public records in their custody to fee-based commercial data "JSTOR Statement: Misuse Incident and Criminal Case". JSTOR. Retrieved January 21, 2013.compilers and information brokers who provide access for an even higher cost. Any number of people may want to access the public records in these databases but they cannot do so due to the fees required. This is unconscionable since public records are already paid for by the taxes of the people. Why should they have to pay a second time for public records essentially ‘held in trust’ for them by the government?

Public records provide notice of official actions taken by government to all the individual members of society, as well as give the official status of individuals and property. Using the internet and other new electronic technology to make public records accessible to citizens is a potent way to empower people with tools to keep government accountable quickly and cheaply. The internet allows easy, inexpensive access to public records information from a multitude of databases. This internet access does alter the balance between access and privacy that has existed in paper and microfiche records because no one has to physically retrieve such records, but such records are still available public records--- they just require more effort to obtain. As other countries’ concerns over personal privacy have lead them to enact laws that limit the ability to use personal information, the United States must continue to resist regulating how information on individuals can be gathered and used. Public records were meant to be free and accessible; thus, any laws that limit the public's rights to access such information should be resisted.

Swartz understood that the benefits of free access to public records cannot be underestimated. While much of what he downloaded and put into the public domain for free access were scholarly works and judicial documents, the ability to access other public records freely is just as valuable. Public records are the foundation of all of our real property and real estate transactions. Every day journalists and reporters rely on public records for information to use in news reports that inform the public about crimes, court cases, legislation, abuse, government fraud, waste, and abuse, and countless other issues. Moreover, law enforcement uses public record information to prevent, detect, and solve crimes. For example, the FBI routinely uses commercial online databases and social media to obtain a wide variety of public source information about individuals they are seeking, including witnesses, tax cheats and deadbeat parents. Epidemiologists and other researchers collect public information for thousands of studies each year concerning public health, disease patterns, environmental quality, and other subjects. Public records are used for many legitimate reasons and should be accessible by anyone, not just those with financial resources and specialized know-how.

Three days after Swartz died, the global hacktivist collective, Anonymous, broke into MIT's website and replaced its front page with the simple line: "In Memoriam, Aaron Swartz." A statement followed that called the Justice Department's prosecution "a grotesque miscarriage of justice" and "a distorted and perverse shadow of the justice that Aaron died fighting for. We call for this tragedy to be a basis for a renewed and unwavering commitment to a free and unfettered Internet, spared from censorship with equality of access and franchise for all." Free access to public records is absolutely necessary in order to assure accountability of our government and public officials, as well as secure our collective safety and civil liberties. These records must be seen. Additionally, internet freedom economically facilitates public record access, making information and knowledge as available as possible to the ordinary individual for a variety of beneficial uses. Supporting measures that enhance free access to public records could help prevent another case like Aaron Swartz’s from happening again.

An investigative documentary from director Brian Knappenberger about the life of the internet pioneer and activist Aaron Swartz.

Currently titled “The Internet’s Own Boy,” the new film by Brian Knappenberger, director of “We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists,” follows internet activist and programming pioneer Aaron Swartz from his teenage emergence on the internet scene and involvement in RSS and Reddit, to his increased interest in political advocacy and the controversial actions he allegedly took in downloading nearly four million academic articles from the online service JSTOR. The film explores Aaron’s arrest, the prosecution’s tactics in bringing the case to trial through the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the CFAA, and the impact a seemingly small hacking gesture had on Aaron’s life and the future of information access on the internet.

Documents released show the secret service was interested in a document Swartz penned calling for open information

The first batch of secret service documents about Aaron Swartz has been released amid a legal battle to publicly share the 14,500 pages the government has amassed in its investigation of the internet activist.

Swartz was federally indicted on 13 charges including computer fraud, theft of information and wire fraud for downloading 4m articles from the JSTOR database through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer network. He was facing up to $1m in fines and 35 years in jail for these charges when he killed himself in January.

The documents show that the secret service was interested in a document penned by Swartz and others calling for open information – the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto. Some, including a congressional aide, believe this document was used to establish "malicious intent" in the government's case against him.

In January we lost Aaron Swartz, 26, to suicide. Or better, as the breadth of his work was wide and its depth, profound: In January we all lost Aaron Swartz to suicide.

At 14, Aaron gave us RSS—the syndication protocol that feeds information across the Net automatically. Two years later, he developed the technical architecture for Creative Commons—a system of free copyright licenses authorizing people to share creative work freely. He later helped build the Open Library, to catalog books online. He liberated, legally, a database (known as PACER) of government-owned court documents, thus lowering the cost of many legal services. He provided a key technical component to the news site Reddit, becoming an equal partner in that incredibly successful company. And just before his death, he was completing work on a suite of tools to make online activism insanely more effective.

Yet Aaron was not just, or even primarily, a computer geek. His defining feature was a constant struggle for what he believed was right. More than anyone I have ever known, Aaron’s sense for what was just was his single guide. He had made a fortune, almost by accident, with his work on Reddit and used that wealth to pursue a fight for what he believed to be right—no matter the context. Until one of those battles got out of his control....

The Internet’s Own Boy,” a documentary about the life and death of Aaron Swartz, premièred on Monday at the Sundance Film Festival, where it received a standing ovation. The life of Swartz as a coder and an Internet thinker is well known. A believer in free access to knowledge, in 2010 Swartz installed a computer in an M.I.T. supply closet and downloaded a large number of old academic articles. He was detected, caught, and charged by a federal prosecutor with thirteen felonies; in January of 2013, before his trial, Swartz killed himself. The documentary, shot in the course of that year, gives us relatively little new information about the legal controversy, but it is deeply revealing about who Swartz was.

Narconon Reviews has some values in common with Aaron Swartz, particularly the belief in making information available to people. To honor his memory today, we’ve added a bunch of documents to the site.

That was archived? I had no idea, great! A lot of those stories from the 90s; same stuff we're seeing today. Twenty years later and our noble elected leaders haven't done squat about this fraudulent rip-off scam!